TDSi South East Asia Visit 2022

I never need to find an excuse to visit Southeast Asia and Australia. The Asia Pacific region has long been a keen consumer and supporter of TDSi’s products and services, and a visit never disappoints. With a heady mixture of the familiar and the exotic (for me anyway!), I never shy away from the inevitable jetlag and the opportunity to meet with our partners, customers, and other friends on the other side of the globe.  

I have just got back from another whistlestop tour of Asia, meeting with TDSi’s local partners and customers in Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand. As is always the case, I was thrilled and delighted to see what is happening in the security sector in this most vibrant and exciting region.

Day one – Singapore

Singapore has only recently reawakened from the restrictions of COVID, but my visit highlighted how keen the local security market is to move forwards with fresh projects. Our integration partners there have reported impressive signs of market recovery.

TDSi’s GARDiS range is proving to be popular in Singapore and we have recently won some projects that utilise the GARDiS software for the likes of Allegion and PriceWaterhouseCooper. My visit was a great opportunity to catch up with our integration partners and to get a better idea of how we can support them in nurturing the impressive shoots of recovery in the country.

Next stop Australia

Next on my itinerary was Australia and a visit to our excellent longstanding partner Comvision, which has just signed some exciting distribution deals with Chubb for software from one of our VITAPROTECH Group sister companies, PRYSM Software. Chubb will be actively selling PRYSM Software’s command and control software in the Australian marketplace with Comvision, but an equally important part of that contract is Comvision also selling TDSi’s products as well.

Working with Chubb in Australia takes us back to TDSi’s early days in the mid-1980s, when we were selling a lot of kit in the country through a partnership with the company. Its interesting to see how relationships in the security industry can often revolve around to where they began.

Onto Malaysia

One of the most significant of my visits on the trip was to Kuala Lumpur and our joint work with Panasonic Malaysia. Our joint demonstration suite in Kuala Lumpur has been updated with TDSi’s latest GARDiS hardware and has just gone live.

It was very exciting to see our hardware systems being displayed locally and to see our partnership with Panasonic Malaysia in action. Despite the centricity around software now, physical security systems still have a tangible physical quality where people like to see and touch them ‘in the flesh’ – which is why these demonstration suites are so important.

Finishing in Thailand

To round off my tour of the region I flew on to Bangkok where I was honoured to take part in the signing of a contract with the Metropolitan Electricity Authority. This is our second major contract win with the organisation and follows one seven years ago which saw our old EX Series controllers being installed into substations across the Bangkok metropolitan area.

The new project will see these being upgraded to the latest TDSi GARDiS platform to offer even greater security and flexibility than ever before. The hardware is being shipped now, and around 170 sites in and around Bangkok will benefit from GARDiS controllers by the end of March 2023.

Growth and opportunity

Being able to travel again is just one of the benefits of the post-pandemic world, it is something I greatly missed whilst restrictions were in place. Despite our amazing abilities to communicate online, nothing quite beats meeting people face to face, particularly if you have made real efforts to get there.

In the UK we have seen a considerable return of business in 2022, but many parts of Asia are only just beginning to share these benefits as their restrictions subside. We are expecting to see the Southeast Asian and Australian markets flourish again in 2023 and onwards, and my visit was a great reminder of the amazing partnerships we have that will help to drive this forward.